NY Philharmonic to Release More Archive Online

The New York Philharmonic will post a new batch of pages from its vast archive online in February.

The orchestra will release 520,000 pages of instrumental music parts. It’s already posted over 1,300 orchestral scores online. After that, it will release concert programs, correspondence, business records and annual reports dating back to 1842.

The orchestra posted its first batch of records—representing the era of music director Leonard Bernstein from 1943 to 1970—two years ago. Since then, the site has attracted nearly 80,000 visitors from 143 countries, many drawn to orchestral scores such as a Gustav Mahler symphony with conducting notes penciled in by the composer himself. The digital archives already are spurring new academic research. And other arts organizations have taken the Philharmonic’s lead, launching their own digitization projects.

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Last year, Carnegie Hall and the Brooklyn Academy of Music announced similar projects. Carnegie Hall, in the first phase of an endeavor estimated to cost $5 million, is now digitizing 1,900 hours of audio, 480 hours of video, and 17,000 feet of film. BAM, in a smaller-scale project, is scanning tens of thousands of items from its collection of ephemera, including programs, posters, blueprints, photographs and correspondence.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.